Three of the seven openly gay or lesbian justices on the nation's state supreme courts, and the first lesbian jurist on the Bay Area's federal bench, got together in San Francisco last week and agreed that being a gay judge isn't much of an issue these days. At least not where they live.

Twenty years ago, when Sabrina McKenna was appointed as a trial court judge in Hawaii, "I was worried about my sexuality being a negative issue," the 55-year-old justice said Thursday evening at a panel sponsored by the Asian American Bar Association.

"I don't think it's a negative anymore," said McKenna, who was appointed to the Hawaii Supreme Court in February 2011. "The powers that be are looking to diversify the bench."

Rives Kistler said "nobody blinked an eye" when he was appointed to Oregon's Court of Appeals in 1999. But there was a short-lived backlash when Democratic Gov. Ted Kulongoski, Kistler's former boss as state attorney general, named him to Oregon's Supreme Court in 2003, making him the first openly gay jurist on any state's high court.

He faced a conservative challenger the following year, and six weeks before the election he found he was trailing. An internal campaign poll, he recalled, showed that disclosure of his sexual orientation caused a 24 percentage point drop in his approval rating. But he wound up winning with more than 60 percent of the vote - helped, he said, by State Bar disciplinary action against his opponent - and he ran for re-election unopposed in 2010.

Also in 2010, U.S. District Court judges in San Francisco appointed Donna Ryu, a civil rights attorney and UC Hastings law professor, as a federal magistrate. No openly gay or lesbian judicial officer had ever served on the court.

California's voters had banned same-sex marriage less than two years earlier, but this was San Francisco, the climate was changing, and Ryu was determined to be as open as possible.

"I wanted people to know that I was lesbian," she said. In the January 2010 news release announcing her appointment, she said, she proposed including her membership on the board of the National Center for Lesbian Rights - only to be told by a clerk that the court's chief judge, Vaughn Walker, was "wondering whether you really want to have that in there."

Ryu agreed to delete the reference, and instead, the release mentioned her female "partner," a local attorney. Nonetheless, it doesn't appear to have generated a single news story.

Prop. 8 judge

Walker, meanwhile, was hearing a challenge to the same-sex marriage ban, Proposition 8, which he declared unconstitutional in August 2010. The Chronicle reported in February 2010 that Walker was gay, an open secret in legal circles but one that Walker did not confirm publicly until April 2011, two months after he retired from the bench.

That same month, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick nominated veteran Appeals Court Justice Barbara Lenk to the state's Supreme Judicial Court. Eight years earlier, the court had been the nation's first to declare a legal right for gays and lesbians to marry, but it had never had an openly gay or lesbian justice.

A few people made hostile comments at her confirmation hearing the following month, but "we lived through it," said Lenk, whose nomination by the Democratic governor was preceded by judicial appointments in 1993 and 1995 from Republican Gov. William Weld.

"Massachusetts, like California, has a generally easy relationship between the straight and gay community," she said.

While some judges have run into opposition for issuing gay-rights rulings, there have been no evident repercussions to the gradual increase in gay and lesbian judges.

More appointments

President Obama has appointed six gays or lesbians to the nation's federal courts - six times the number who were serving when he took office. Gov. Jerry Brown, who in his first term in the 1970s appointed the nation's first openly gay and lesbian judges, named a top legal adviser, James Humes, to a state appeals court in San Francisco last November, making him California's first openly gay appellate justice.

Does it make a difference in judicial decisions?

"That's a dangerous question," Ryu said Thursday, recalling the controversy over Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's comments about the possible advantages of having a "wise Latina" on the bench. "I think you bring to it who you are."